Tradition, tradition

Why is it that most Christians don’t appear to be reluctant to attempt to pronounce Yahweh¹, the name of God? You see, Jews reverently call God ‘HaShem’ meaning ‘The Name’. Surely we Christians are irreverent and disrespectful by daring to try to pronounce God’s name?

Actually, most of us would disagree and would make the claim that it’s not God that insisted that we don’t pronounce the very name that he gave to mankind through Moses in order to be able to tell us who he is. Gen 4:26 tells us about when people began to pray using Yahweh’s name. There’s no command in the Bible to tell us to memorise God’s name and then swallow the paper and just call him ‘The Name’ after that. In other words, we’re saying that Christians should follow the scriptures, but are not compelled to follow traditions that don’t appear to come from the scriptures themselves.

So what about the tradition of capitalising pronouns and other words in the scriptures that appear to refer to any member of the trinity? Is this commanded by the very scriptures that are being translated? The simple answer is no—capital (originally called ‘upper case’ because the individual lead dies were kept in a harder-to-reach upper box) and lower-case letters weren’t used together in the same document until several hundred years after Jesus walked on this earth—much, much later than any of the original manuscripts from the Hebrew or Greek scriptures.

So must we capitalise every ‘he’ referring to Jesus in order to show our respect? No, that’s a relatively recent tradition, was not in the original scriptures, and is not commanded by any scriptural text. Sure you can do it if you like that tradition, but please don’t teach that it shows any greater respect for God than the hand-washing regulations of the Pharisees. It’s all fluff and foam.

If you would like to try reading a new, exciting Bible translation that’s not bound by traditions whenever freedom from that tradition might make the Bible more understandable and acceptable in the modern world, try the forthcoming Open English Translation (with a Readers’ Version and a Literal Version side-by-side). Or better still, join us and help.

Robert Hunt, May 2023
https://OpenEnglishTranslation.Bible